ethics

paidcontent.org

Bitcoin is having a wild ride right now. Partly due to the euro crisis, and partly due to a lot of press coverage, some people seem to be taking a keen interest in the crypto-currency — in the last week, its value in relation to the U.S. dollar has shot...

www.theatlantic.com

We have just published Quinn Norton's account of her life inside the Federal investigation of Aaron Swartz for the alleged crime of downloading too many JSTOR articles too quickly. The story fills in a key time in the investigation, from Swartz's arrest on January 6 until about June of that year. Norton's...

arstechnica.com

Jonah Lehrer has long been one of the rising stars of the science writing world. I was a huge fan of his work when he wrote for Wired (a sister publication of Ars) and was happy when he recently left for the New Yorker full time (again, another Conde Nast publication). That...

www.techdirt.com

Close race on the insightful side this week, with jupiterkansas winning by a nose, with this awesome comment in response to the claim that it's somehow "unethical" not to make use of some musicians' preferred business model: I can buy a used CD from Amazon and have it mailed to...

www.guardian.co.uk

Should people - even minors - be held responsible for what they say online? Some recent tweets have opinions dividedThe re-election of Barack Obama provoked, perhaps not surprisingly, some racist, offensive and just plain stupid reaction on social media.But the decision of websites such as Buzzfeed and Jezebel to pick...

allthingsd.com

Five years ago, AllThingsD.com was launched with just a few staffers, a few stories and a whole lot of hope. Also, as it turned out, with the panoply of LOLcat photos. The site had soft-launched a little earlier, but — officially — we opened our doors in the late...

www.appleinsider.com

Responding to a report by the New York Times that castigated Apple over an alleged permissiveness and indifference for workers' conditions among the suppliers it contract with in China, its chief executive Tim Cook rebutted the accusations in an email expressing "any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false...

serea.ro

www.techdirt.com

I know that for many universities, where they end up in the various "rankings" lists can make a big difference in terms of the type of students they attract, the money they can bring in and the professors they can get. So it's almost surprising to me to find out...

pandodaily.com

We wanted to highlight a bit of Twitter drama that unfolded a few minutes ago. It all started when investor Vinod Khosla Tweeted this: This embed is invalid Now in case you didn’t know, Khosla Ventures is an investor in Storify. Whether or not this constitutes a breach of ethics,...

betabeat.com

It was near the end of 2011, and what most New Yorkers knew of the city’s plan to create an ambitious tech campus on Roosevelt Island was that Stanford University had the project in the bag. For Suri Kasirer, the founder and president of Kasirer Consulting, the notion could not...

betabeat.com

Troll Face IRL (Photo: Creative Commons) Yesterday, we told you about the new charges being brought against early Reddit employee and activist coder Aaron Swartz. He’s now facing 13 federal counts after allegedly downloading large portions of JSTOR, an academic database filled with articles and data, in order to release it...

www.theverge.com

Following his recent conviction for identity fraud and conspiracy in the AT&T iPad security breach, Andrew Auernheimer — also known by his online handle weev — published an opinion piece in Wired to tackle the complicated ethics issue of disclosing exploits. Auernheimer frowns on the practice of selling exploits...

thenextweb.com

British fan-to-fan ticket marketplace Seatwave will likely be mentioned in the next edition of the well-known investigative show ‘Dispatches’, its CEO Joe Cohen announced in a letter. Sent to the startup’s customers earlier today, it reads as preemptive albeit cautious defense against the upcoming documentary. Scheduled to air in the UK on Channel 4...

arstechnica.com

Stockton.edu How do ethics and the free market interact? As the authors of a new paper on the topic point out, the answer is often complicated. In the past, Western economies have had vigorous markets for things we now consider entirely unethical, like slaves and Papal forgiveness for sins....

www.geekwire.com

A former Amazon employee is suing the company over his termination, alleging that he was let go in retaliation for going over his manager’s head to bring internal attention to a latency problem that he believed would have “seriously jeopardized” the ad platform launch for the new Kindle Fire tablets...

www.techdirt.com

We've noted what a joke ICANN has been for quite some time, culminating with some of its more bizarre decisions to help governments seize domains and censor the internet. Separately, its sense of entitlement towards its role managing domain registrations is really pretty disgusting. Of course, for years we've also...

www.techdirt.com

I know we've written a few times now about David Lowery's now infamous shaming of an intern because she apparently doesn't give him enough of her money, but that story keeps getting attention. Thankfully, a lot of that attention comes in the form of people from all over the music...

www.engadget.com

A Kickstarter entry has managed to stir the fairness pot by touting a MakerBot Replicator clone called TangiBot -- legally copied from the original 3D printer's open source plans. The project's creator, Matt Strong, says that the device will offer "the same performance and features at a roughly 33...

socialmedia.defense.gov

Air Force and Marine Corps officials have decided to open their networks to allow access to social networking sites. These changes come as a result of the new Department of Defense official policy on new media. Officials recognize that the benefits of internet-based capabilities outweigh the risks, and these sites...

thenextweb.com

The New York Times caused controversy this weekend after it published a story claiming that top VC firm Andreessen Horowitz “fumbled” its investment in Instagram, losing million of dollars by backing photo-sharing rival Picplz over the company that Facebook will acquire for $1 billion. As we already pointed out, the NYT...

www.techdirt.com

A few years back, we noted an ethics opinion in Florida that stated that judges cannot be Facebook friends with lawyers who may appear before them in court. As we noted at the time, this seemed to go pretty far, as Facebook friends didn't mean "personal" friends, and there are...